Internet cafes and other shared access hosts desire restoration of a baseline system condition to shared computers after every computing session to ensure a consistent and reliable user experience. Typically, this requires that the host system be rebooted after each session to restore the baseline state.
Hibernation allows for the contents of system memory and registers (e.g., device hardware registers states, page file/application and driver states, and so on) to be saved to persistent storage such as a hard disk for the purposes of a quicker restoration of the conditions associated with the last computing session. This feature is primarily used to allow the operating system of a computer to be shutdown, such that on the following startup, the operating system is restored from the hibernation file and resumes from the point where it was shutdown.
This hibernation feature typically utilizes a single file (e.g., hiberfil.sys), which is written to upon initiation of the feature. Subsequently, the hibernation file is used to restore the operating system to its previous condition as part of the boot process.